Parsley Steinweiss Stacks

The artistic practice of Parsley Steinweiss is rooted in the idea that the closer you get to something the more complex and obscure that something becomes. By cropping her subjects closely, the artist is not only becoming intimate with them, but also abstracting them.

By this treatment, familiar subjects become unrecognizable and require new investigation. The shape-shifting ambiguity made possible by the photographic lens resonates with my general sense of a world unseen by the naked eye, a world of possibilities.

The Stacks series is about the daily accumulation of the things in our lives and the physical presence of these things as objects. For this series, Parsley Steinweiss stacked objects such as books, papers, magazines, journals, sketchpads and photographs. Each stack represents something different – a passage of time, a collection, a history. In Contact Sheets, she has stacked hundreds of photographic contact sheets that she has created over the past 10 years. The result is a series of lines, each representing a print that the artist has made, a sedimentary record of creative growth.